Episode 42 - Karen Newby on putting the ’spark plugs’ into our nutrition and fuelling up our midlife bodies and souls!

Karen Newby is a registered nutritionist with over 10 years’ experience coaching women through the menopause - she’s also the author of The Natural Menopause Method, published in October 2022. 

Karen’s beautifully designed and easy to read book is a comprehensive guide to nourishing our bodies and our minds at this critical stage of life. It’s the kind of book that I know I’ll keep to hand to dip in and out of, refer back to and remind myself about better nutrition whenever my good intentions slip! The book is peppered throughout with “Small Shifts” which are a great place to start if you’re feeling a little bit of overwhelm at trying to change too much too quickly. There’s also a whole section dedicated to ‘symptom troubleshooting’ (eg aches and pains, allergies and intolerances, brain fog, fatigue, hot flushes, insomnia and more…) - including explanations of ‘why is this happening to me’ and therapeutic foods that may help. 

Karen’s food philosophy is very much ‘eat more, not less’ - making sure we are giving our bodies the right fuel and ‘spark plugs’ as she calls the key nutrients! We cover so much in this episode - from how to move away from ‘beige food’ for kids to family meals we can all enjoy, and ditching our reactionary approaches to eating in ‘fight or flight’ mode and moving towards a state of rest and digest. 

We also look at the impact of falling oestrogen on our sensitivity to sugar and why increasing our intake of anti-inflammatory foods at this time of life is so important. 

You can find Karen at https://karennewby.com/ and on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/karen.newby.nutritionist/